Success of semiconductor electronics has largely resulted from a great personal and commercial utility derived from high-speed electronic communications. Provision of these electronic communications, particularly on a global scale, involves the convergence of several factors: development of communication infrastructure to transport data, design of components and devices to initiate or facilitate communication and various applications thereof, and manufacturing techniques to fabricate these components. Massive demand for the utility of electronic communication has engendered an industry related to each of the factors. Infrastructure developers provide global networks to transport data and interpersonal communications, software developers provide applications, operating systems, and computing devices to access, manage and utilize the communications, component designers develop electronic components—processors, memory, etc.—to process and store the data, and fabrication facilities create the electronic components.
One reason for the persistent success of electronics is the variety and diversity of useful applications that develop from increases in speed and capacity of electronic components. In turn, the speed and capacity of such components is associated with an intensive transistor down-scaling process, in which smaller transistors have lead to increased storage capacity, and in some cases increased processing power. In recent years, components such as field effect transistors used for switches, memory cells, and other components of electronic devices have achieved sizes on the order of 20 nm. Even smaller such devices are theorized. The inventors of the present disclosure, however, believe that significant challenges will occur for sub-20 nm transistor components, including short channel effects, performance degradation, longevity problems, and so on.
Resistive memory devices represent a recent innovation within the field of integrated circuit technology. While much of this technology is in the development stages, various technological concepts for proposed resistive memory devices and fabrication of the same have been demonstrated by the inventors. The inventors believe that various resistive memory technologies and various techniques for fabricating various resistive memory devices show compelling evidence to hold substantial advantages over competing technologies in the semiconductor electronics industry.
Over time, advancement in technology has provided an increase in a number of semiconductor devices, such as transistors, that can be fabricated on a given geometric area of a semiconductor chip. An implication of increasing the number of semiconductor devices is increasing memory capacity and processing power for the semiconductor chip and associated electronic devices.
In light of the above, the inventors desire to continue developing practical utilization and fabrication of resistive memory technology.